Book Thoughts: The Inevitable
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future was written by Kevin Kelly in 2016, and covers 12 macro technological themes that are predicted to shape the next 30 years of our lives.
It is interesting to see that even between the time the book was written (2016) and now, several of the themes highlighted in the book have already begun to play out.
It is also important to note that these are just predictions, and like everybody else, Kevin Kelly is likely to be wrong on some of these. I’ve extracted the points which resonated with me throughout his book below:
Becoming
Even the intangible (e.g. software) requires additional energy and order to maintain itself.
Machines are updating themselves, this happens gradually, so we don’t notice they are “becoming”.
The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.
The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning.
Today truly is a wide-open frontier. We are all becoming. It is the best time ever in human history to begin.
You are not late.
Cognifying
Cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence is inevitable.
The advantage gains from cognifying inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialisation.
Ideally, not just cheap but free, like the free commons of the web
Built in the internet of multiple devices, rather than in a supercomputer as previously expected.
When this emerging AI arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it.
The arrival of artificial thinking accelerates all the other disruptions.
Excellent example of the magic of adding AI to X can be seen in photography.
3 recent breakthroughs have unleashed the long-awaited arrival of artificial intelligence.
Cheap Parallel Computation (GPUs)
Big Data - the incredible avalanche of collected data about our world, which provides the schooling that AIs need
Better Algorithms
Human/AI cyborgs are more effective than pure AI or pure Human.
There is a vast range of potential minds. Might not be like human minds. New kinds of intelligences. We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already happening around us. To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots, too, will think different.
We need to let robots take over. It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us to dream up new work that matters.
Flowing
The internet is the world’s largest copy machine.
The digital economy runs on this river of freely flowing copies. Copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a superconductor, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire.
The initial age of computing borrowed from the Industrial Age. As Marshall McLuhan observed the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first computers employed the metaphors of the office, folders, desktop, files, etc. The second digital age overturned the office metaphor and brought us the organising principle of the web. The basic unit was no longer files but “pages” organised in a networked web rather than folders. The desktop interface was replaced by a “browser,” a uniform window that looked into any and all pages. This web of links was flat. Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams. We constantly monitor Twitter streams and the flows of posts. We stream photos, movies, and music.
Flowing time has shifted as well. Initially tasks were done in batches e.g. monthly bills. Then with the web we expected everything same day. Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time. If we message someone, we expect them to reply instantly.
When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. We call that branding.
Eight generatives that are “better than free”
Immediacy e.g. going to theatres on opening night
Personalization e.g. sound file just for your setup
Interpretation - e.g. selling instructions to software
Authenticity
Accessibility - from all devices etc.
Embodiment - physical copies
Patronage - deep down, avid audiences and fans want to pay creators.
Discoverability e.g. Netflix’s recommendation engine
Steady democratisation of arts - Fixity to flows - There are the Four Stages of Flowing that apply to all media:
Fixed. Rare - The starting norm - each product is an artisan work, sold in high-quality reproductions.
Free. Ubiquitous - commodity, cheap, perfect copies.
Flowing. Sharing. - Unbundling of the product into parts, each element flowing to find its own new users and to be remixed into new bundles.
Opening. Becoming - enable amateurs with little expertise to create new products and brand-new categories of products. The status of creation is inverted so that the audience is now the artist. Output, selection, and quality skyrocket.
Screening
In ancient times, culture revolved around the spoken word.
By the means of cheap and perfect copies, printed text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability.
Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.
Mass-produced books changed how people thought.
We are now People of the Screen.
This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen.
People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels. Half-baked ideas.
Notions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to every thing else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth.
People of the Book favour solutions by laws, while People of the Screen favour technology as a solution to all problems. Truth is, we are in transition, and the clash between the cultures occurs within us as individuals as well.
Despite fears that reading and writing were over, we know reading and write more than ever. Literacy rates have remained flat in the US over past 20 years.
We should call this new activity “screening” rather than reading. Screening includes reading words, but also watching words and reading images.
Are books dead? Some scholars of literature claim that a book is really that virtual place your mind goes to when you are reading.
A book is less an artefact and more a stream that flows into your view.
This liquidity is just as true for the creation of books as for consumption.
Dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event. Wikipedia is the first networked book.
The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.
So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things:
Works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near zero audience they usually have now.
The universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilisation is scanned and cross-linked.
The universal networked library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts, then you can have a clearer sense fo what we as a civilisation, a species, do and don’t know. The empty white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted.
Becomes a platform for cultural life.
Accessing
Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning with few of its disadvantages.
Advanced technology has enabled this magical rental store.
Five deep technological trends accelerate this long-term move toward accessing and away from ownership
Dematerialization - trend over the past 30 years has been to make better stuff using fewer materials. Digital technology accelerates dematerialisation by hastening the migration from products to services. The liquid nature of services means they don’t have to be bound to materials. An automobile today is really a computer on wheels. The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we’ll treat these articles as social property. This has given rise to the “as a service” model.
Real-time on demand - Access is also a way to deliver new things in close to real time. One reason so much money is flowing into the service frontier is that there are so many more ways to be a service than to be a product.
Decentralization - We are at the midpoint in a hundred-year scramble toward greater decentralisation. The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication. Without the ability to remain connected as things spread wide into networks, firms would collapse. The consequence of moving away from centralised organisation to the flatter worlds of networks is that everything - both tangible and intangible - must flow faster to keep the whole going together. Flows are hard to wool possession seems to just skip through your fingers. Access is a more appropriate stance for the fluid relations that govern a decentralised apparatus. Blockchain. Blockchains are public commons.
Platform Synergy - historically two basic ways to organise human work: a firm and a marketplace. Recently, a third way has emerged: the platform. A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. A platform, like a department store, offers stuff it did not create. e.g. Microsoft OS. Levels of highly interdependent products and services form an “ecosystem” that rests upon the platform. Recently successful companies are all Multisite markets, run by a firm. Ecosystems are governed by coevolution, which is a type of biological codependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation.
Clouds - A cloud is a colony of millions of computers that are braided together seamlessly to act as a single large computer. The web is hyperlinked documents the cloud is hyperlinked data.
Sharing
Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide.
Wikipedia is a notable example of an emerging collectivism. Wikis are a set of documents that are collaboratively produced; their text can easily be created, added, edited, or altered by anyone, and by everyone.
Unlike older strains of red-flag socialism, this new digital socialism runs over a borderless internet, via network communications, generating intangible services throughout a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralisation. It is decentralisation extreme.
Primary currency in this new socialism is sharing (“sharing economy”)
“Dot-communism” a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralised gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space.
A hierarchy for sorting by the increasing degree of coordination employed
Sharing - The mildest form of digital socialism, but foundational for all the higher levels of communal engagement. The online public has an incredible willingness to share.
Cooperation - When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. For example, amateurs have shared billions of photos on Flickr and Tumblr, and they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Community sharing can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Reddit and Twitter can steer public conversation as much, and maybe more, than newspapers or TV networks. The sum outperforms the parts.
Collaboration - Organised collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of adhoc cooperation. Just look at the hundreds of open source software projects. In these endeavours, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousand of members. The work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective - the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid - that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism. Adding to the economic dissonance, we’ve become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge.
Collectivism - Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralised authority, technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximise both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom. Alternative to both state-based and market-based closed proprietary systems.
Similar to free markets over the past century - every time we ask how close to a non capitalistic, open source peer-production society can this movement take us? The answer has been: closer than we thought
Bottom up is not enough. We need a bit of top down as well. Every predominantly bottom-up organisation that lasts for more than a few years does so because it becomes a hybrid of bottom up plus some top down.
If the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all? Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough for a lot of work. First, the bottom -up hive mind will always take us much further than we imagine. Second, even though a purely decentralised power won’t take us all of the way, it is almost always the best way to start. It’s fast, cheap, and out of control.
Tens of millions which are micro-small, explosion of creator economy.
The power of crowdsourcing - in funding, ideas, etc.
We have barely begun to explore what kinds of amazing things a crowd can do. There must be two million different ways to crowdfund an idea, or to crowdorganize it, or to crowd make it. There must be a million more new ways to share unexpected things in unexpected ways. In the next three decades the greatest wealth - and most interesting cultural innovations - lie in this direction.
Filtering
We now have countless choices. There is simply not enough time in any lifetime to review the potential of each choice, one by one. We need help to navigate. Our only choice is to get assistance in making choices
Filter by gatekeepers
Filter by intermediates
Filter by curators
Filter by brands
Filter by government
Filter by our cultural environment
Filter by our friends
Filter by ourselves
None of these methods disappear in the rising superabundance.
As they mature, filtering systems will be extended to other decentralised systems beyond media, to services like Uber and Airbnb. Your personal preferences in hotel style, status, etc. Heavily dignified, incredibly smart filters can be applied to any realm with a lot of choices - which will be more and more realms. Anywhere we want personalisation, filtering will follow.
A filter focuses human attention. The more content expands, the more focused that attention needs to become. “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it comes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”.
Attention is the last scarcity. Wherever attention flows, money will follow.
Yet for being so precious, our attention is relatively inexpensive. It is cheap, in part, because we have to give it away each day. We can’t save it up or hoard it. We have to spend it second by second, in real time.
But not all attention is equal. In the advertising business, quantity of attention is reflected in CPM.
In the coming two decades the challenge and opportunity is to harness filtering technologies to cultivate higher quality attention at scale. Today, the bulk of the internet economy is fuelled by trillions of hours of low-grade commodity attention.
Decentralizing ads - publishers could choose which ads to show. Copy ads from other sites, show them, and still get credit
A fully decentralised peer-to-peer user-generated crowdsourced ad network would let users create ads, and then let user-publishers choose which ads they wanted to place on their site. Those user-generated ads that actually produced clicks would be kept and/or shared. Users would become ad agencies, as they have become everything else.
We have not yet explored all the possible ways to exchange and massage attention and influence. A blank continent is opening up. Many of the most interesting possible modes - like getting paid for your attention or influence are still unborn. The future forms of attention will emerge from a choreography of streams of influence that are subject to tracking, filtering, sharing, and remixing. The scale of data needed to orchestrate this dance of attention reaches new heights of complexity.
Our lives are already significantly more complex than even five years ago. We need to pay attention to far more sources in order to do our jobs, to learn, to parent, or even to be entertained.
The price of commodities tends to being free. The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences - which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditised and filterable. The value of experience is rising.
More filtering is inevitable because we can’t stop making new things.
Remixing
Growth comes from remixing.
Modern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed.
The more new genres, the more possible newer ones that can be remixed from them - rate of possible combinations grows exponentially, expanding the culture and the economy.
We live in a golden age of new mediums.
The supreme fungibility of digital bits allows forms to morph easily, to mutate and hybridise. The accelerating fluidity of bits will continue to overtake media for the next 30 years, furthering a great remixing.
At the same time, the cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images and upsetting a great asymmetry that has been inherent in all media.
We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The hand-crafted holly wood film is a rare tiger. It won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming critters below.
As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate, and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be re-manipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words.
In addition to findability, another ongoing revolution within media can be considered “rewind ability” In the oral age, when someone spoke, you needed to listen carefully. This “redo” function encourages creativity.
Going forward, we are likely to get impatient with experiences that don’t have undo buttons, such as eating a meal.
Remixing plays havoc with traditional notions of property and ownership.
Interacting
Two benefits propel VR’s current rapid progress
Presence - this is what sells VR
interaction
We are equipping our devices with sense - eyes, ears, motions - so that we can interact with them. The will not only know we are there, they will know who is there and whether than person is in a good mood
Your body is your password. Your digital identity is you
In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.
Tracking
We are opaque to ourselves and need all the help we can get to decipher who we are.
Improvements to sensors has given rise to the Quantified Self movement, where people track various aspects of their life.
Self-tracking is much broader than health. It is as big as our life itself.
The flow of events is called a lifestream “diary of electronic life”. Strict chronological nature makes it easy to navigate
Lifestream is still active tracking. There is a passive type of tracking sometimes called life logging. The point of life logging is to create total recall.
The internet is the world’s largest, fastest tracking machine, and any thing that touches it that can be tracked will be tracked.
The fastest-increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating
Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits.
The challenge is that the bulk of usable information today has been arranged in forms that only humans understand. But we are at our limits. Humans can no longer touch, let alone process, zillions of bits. To exploit the full potential of the zillion bytes of data that we are harvesting and creating, we need to be able to arrange bits in ways that machines and artificial intelligences can understand. Entirely new industries have sprung up in the last two decades based on the idea of unbundling. Sort of like smashing information into ever smaller sub particles that can be recombined into a new chemistry.
Questioning
Humans have long invested new social organisations,. These social instruments are what makes us human - and what makes our heavier “impossible” from the vantage point of animals.
Our society is moving away from the rigid order of hierarchy towards the fluidity of decentralisation. And the value engine is moving from the certainties of answers to the uncertainties of questions.
Questioning is simply more powerful than answering
Beginning
It is just the Beginning.